Juan Rulfo: Pedro Paramo

Jim Lewis reviews Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo.

It's a very strange book; let me admit that at the outset. It's as primitive and uncanny as a folk tale, plain-spoken but infinitely complex, a neat little metaphysical machine—one of those small, perfect books that remake the world out of paradox, like Waiting for Godot, or Nadja.

When it was first published in Mexico City in 1955, it received a few tepid notices and sold poorly. Its author was 37 at the time, or 38. (No one seems to know for sure when he was born.) He was from Jalisco, near Guadalajara, and he'd published one mildly interesting collection of short stories a few years earlier. I suspect no one knew what to make of the new book, since it was entirely unlike—well—anything else. Perhaps the critics were astounded into silence; more likely, they were puzzled and a little bit blind. As for the author, he went silent and never wrote another book, though he lived on for more than 30 years, long enough to see himself credited with the invention of an entire movement, to see his only novel sell millions of copies, to receive mash notes from Nobel Prize winners.

In Latin America, he eventually came to be considered canonical, a master of modernism, but here in the United States, his reputation remains curiously split between those few who adore him and the many who have never heard of him. When I mention to people that I'm reading his book again (I've read it five or six times in the past few years), I invariably get one of two responses. A few will announce that it's one of their favorite books, but the majority will say, "Pedro …what? By Juan … who?" And to these latter I'll explain: Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. A very great novel.

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Mexican Literature

"A sparse, restless ghost story that ushered in the surreal and influenced later magic realists."

Michael Ondaatje selected Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo" as one of the top 5 books of his life, in Newsweek's A Life in Books

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Latin American Literature

Pedro Paramo on film

From Variety:

Alejandro Amenabar co-scribe Mateo Gil is teaming with Spain’s Sogecine and Ariete-Ariane and Portugal’s Take 2000 to write and direct a bigscreen adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s novel “Pedro Paramo,” a seminal work in modern Latin American literature.

Mexican Eugenio Caballero, who won an Academy Award this year for “Pan’s Labyrinth,” has been tapped as art director.

Gil and Caballero are scouting in Jalisco, Mexico, for a ghost village as the film’s key location.

Gil and Sogecine, the film production division of giant Spanish TV conglom Sogecable, worked as helmer and producer on Gil’s flamboyant debut, the 1999 Seville-set thriller “Nobody Knows Anybody.”

Producers of “Pedro Paramo’s” movie version aim to set it up as a Spain-Portugal-Mexico co-production to shoot largely in Mexico by late 2007 or early 2008.

The project’s challenges are less financial than artistic.

Rulfo’s 1955 “Pedro Paramo” follows narrator Juan Preciado to his mother’s native village of Comala, a dust-bowl hell. He only gradually cottons on to the fact that all the villagers he meets are dead.

“Pedro Paramo” had large influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the cornerstone of magical realism.

But, rather like Marquez’s works, “Pedro Paramo” is thought a huge challenge for film adaptation: Gil himself calls the project “an act of daring.”

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Latin American Cinema

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

A man, whose name is not revealed until half the novel, goes to Comala to pay a promise made to his mother on her death bed: to find his father and claim what is theirs. The story of Juan's experience, his search for identity and his heritage, is interwoven with the tale of his father, Pedro Paramo.

Pedro Paramo dominates the landscape of the novel which flows hynotically through dreams, desires and memories. The novel propels the reader down a dusty forgotten road to a town of death, a place populated by ghosts and living memories.

Juan Rulfo's extraordinarily powerful novel, Pedro Paramo, captures the essence of life in rural Mexico during the last years of the 19th century, and the beginning of the 20th.

Buy Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo at Amazon.com
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